People For The American Way are urging members to e-mail U.S. Senators to go slow on confirmation of President Bush's new U.S. Supreme Court nominee John Roberts; and they're utilizing a wireless messaging technology first used to build loyalty among fans of teen idol Britney Spears. Sounds strange, sure. But here's the New Yorker with more:

Advocacy groups on both sides of the political fence are again cranking up their phone-bank operations and e-mail campaigns, as they get ready for the showdown. One organization, People for the American Way, is trying something new: an initiative to coordinate thousands of simultaneous calls to the Senate by alerting it's members via cell-phone text messaging, a medium more generally associated with preteen flirting or casting votes for “American Idol" than with progressive activism. The group is calling the operation Mass Immediate Response, or MIR, though at least one political observer has dubbed it the Britney Option.

MIR is the creation of Jed Alpert, a wireless-entertainment entrepreneur, who originally developed the application, in 2001, for a cross-promotional marketing campaign by the electronics company Samsung and the pop star Britney Spears.

At a cost of $19.95 for three months, tens of thousands of the singer’s fans (many of them, it turned out, men no longer in their teens) signed up to receive several text messages a week, supposedly from Britney. By selecting a link embedded in each message, subscribers would be led to a recorded message, either from Spears herself (“Hey, it’s Britney Spears. Can I just tell you, I had a blast at your party— seriously, your friends are really cool. Next time I have a party, you’re totally invited”) or from one of the members of her entourage, among them her personal assistant, Alicia, and her bodyguard, Big Rob.

The novel aspect of the technology is its ability to deliver customized messages to registered cell-phone users, based on such criteria as the user’s address, date of birth, and, in some cases, musical tastes. For participants in the Britney Spears promotion, this meant getting to hear Spears read their horoscopes every month.

At the height of the filibuster debate last spring, Alpert was volunteering on the phone bank at People for the American Way. One night, after hours of leaving messages on answering machines, being asked to call back later, and getting trapped in long conversations with lonely radicals in the Midwest, he was struck by the inefficiency of person-to-person organizing over landlines. He realized that his wireless technology could be used to instantly mobilize thousands of activists, though they would have to be sorted by where they lived and who represented them in Washington, rather than by the alignment of the planets at the time of their birth. Alpert sold People for the American Way on the idea, and he is now shopping the technology around to other progressive organizations. (He recently changed its name from W.F.X., which stands for Wireless Fan Access, to Politext.)

Last week, on the morning after the Roberts nomination, People for the American Way was ready with its first MIR campaign. Several thousand text messages went out to the cell phones of the group’s participating members, urging them to call their senators (by clicking an embedded link) and tell them to “hold judgment until facts are in!”

While I fully support the Roberts nomination, and have previously bemoaned the typically stale, pro-forma jousting over Supreme Court nominations, I must say I admire Alpert's enterprise and respect his motivation, organizationally speaking, at least. As a recovering community organizer myself, I can sympathize with the unspeakable horror he encountered after "hours of leaving messages on answering machines, being asked to call back later, and getting trapped in long conversations with lonely radicals in the Midwest."

Goodness knows, there are plenty of them.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at July 28, 2005 05:59 PM